I am a fly-by-night-editor: Most of my edits are to pages I visit only once. Occasionally I get feedback for my edits in the form of a overt revert, but not very often. If I were an optimist, I would pat myself on the back and assume that my work has been accepted. But I am a realist and I know that many of the edits I made have been silently reverted once I have left the scene, when another editor simply edited over my edit rather than revert it. This is my definition of a silent revert.
Silent reverts happen for two reasons I can think of:
- The most common is probably done by another fly-by-nighter who parachutes into an page, knows nothing about its history and simply edits something that s/he believe needs fixing
- There are also a few editors who revert silently deliberately on-the-sly. In my case these types are stalkers who for reasons they have never shared with me just do not like my edits. They know I do not watch pages I edit and take advantage of it.
Tool request
It would be nice to have a tool that one could use to analyze a sampling of articles one edited to easily spot silent reverts.
Sorry for submitting this half-baked tool request, but it looks like time is running out on this survey.
Ottawahitech (talk) 15:34, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
This card tracks a proposal from the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey
This proposal received 4 support votes, and was ranked #91 out of 107 proposals. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Watchlists#Tools_for_fly-by-night-editors_to_analyze_silent_reverts